Fastest-growing job market? Government — and that’s a disaster
Private-sector hiring has slowed down at a worrisome rate.
When counting downward revisions in hiring from the previous two months, the net employment gain was a meager 99,000 in the June report.
But what is even more troubling is this: Guess what sector of the economy is on the biggest hiring binge?
Government.
During the just-ended first half of 2023, federal, state and local governments added 379,000 workers to their payrolls.
This was more hires than any industry in America.
It was more than mining, manufacturing, construction, wholesale and transportation — COMBINED.
Wait. With the federal government running a $2 trillion annual deficit, and with the COVID crisis long behind us, shouldn’t we be systematically downsizing?
The only industry that comes anywhere near the government in hiring so far in 2023 is health care/hospitals.
And that industry is half funded with government dollars from programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
Even these numbers distort the disproportionate impact government is exerting on the economy because, under the Biden administration, Congress has appropriated hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare subsidies.
For example, the Chips and the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act funneled tens of billions of dollars to the microchip industry, green energy and electric cars.
The government is thus adding tens of thousands of private-sector jobs that are financed by taxpayers.
This is a losing proposition.
The only way the government can spend money to pay for these jobs programs is to subtract investment and jobs from other private employers that don’t have the most-favorable-industry status from politicians.
We should have learned from the Obama years that government subsidies to industries in the end lead to low-productivity spending and bankruptcies.
Remember Solyndra?
The economy is expanding in all the wrong places.
A productive economy increases private-sector jobs and cuts extraneous government jobs.
Bidenomics is doing the opposite.
Vivek Ramaswamy is a Republican candidate for president. Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.
